1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention relate at least to an apparatus, medium, and method clustering audio files, and more particularly, to an apparatus, medium, and method providing audio files using clustering, where audio files having information similar to a query input from a user are extracted and undergo clustering to provide the clustered audio files.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, portable audio file players that can play digital audio files have become more common. Accordingly, relatively small-sized hand-held devices that can reproduce and store such audio files, e.g., on a semiconductor memory device, have similarly received much attention.
With the increase in demand for higher data storage capacities in such portable audio file players, there has also been recent research and development into the next generation players that include small-sized high-capacity hard drives.
Such digital audio files may be loaded into a data storage device of an audio file player after having been downloaded from an audio CD, Internet, or another digital audio device to a PC, for example. The digital audio file data may then be compressed in a selected encoding format and loaded into the data storage device.
Similarly, the audio files may be decompressed and decoded by the audio file player, in accordance with a respective encoding format, during reproduction. Various encoding formats for compressing and decompressing audio files have be used, e.g., MP3 and MP3 Pro, noting that additional encoding formats are equally available.
As only an example, in the case of audio files encoded using MP3, the audio files are provided with a specified frame set, an ID3 tag, at a front or rear of the audio file. Such an ID3 tag may include description text and other data relating to the underlying audio file. For example, the tag may include information such as title, artist, album, year, genre, and comments. The ID3 tag information may also be used to retrieve, sort, and select a specified audio file, and since the ID3 tag information is often stored as text characters, the ID3 tag may be displayed on a display screen of the audio file player.
However, with the development of such technologies, it is a general tendency that devices like the audio file player are made ever so smaller in size, especially as the memory and computing elements therein are minimized. With this tendency, the size of the audio file player may become small and provide only a small-sized display window. This small-sized display is actually inconvenient when a user attempts to select music, e.g., by manipulating a small-sized button, while attempting to view the display window.
In addition, in these smaller devices there is also a problem in that it takes a long time to retrieve a desired audio file, especially with the increase of the number of audio files stored in audio file players.
To efficiently retrieve a user desired audio file, there have been attempts to provide audio files through speech recognition, based on speech recognition of a spoken title, singer's name, or first character, or attempts to retrieve audio files based on a recognized melody or sound, such as humming, or attempts to provide music files having features (singer/album/melody) similar to a currently listened to music by preparing and applying a fingerprint to the audio files that may make it easier to characterize and search for audio files.
However, there are problems with these above methods in that the user retrieval of audio files depends on the underlying sort and intrinsic features of the audio files. It may also be beneficial to remember a complete type of information on files to be retrieved by the user, and provide partial retrieval and remindful retrieval.
In addition, the above methods have further problems in that the retrieval time increases in proportion to the number of audio files to be retrieved. Further, as audio files may not be displayed on a screen, it may take a predetermined time for allowing the user to identify the result of a preferred retrieval of audio files retrieved.